A guy I have worked with for 5 years, and who i worked very closely with over the last year or so, finished up yesterday. These are his cats.
We do try to get people leaving gifts at work. I had a brainwave : he loves his two little cats, so how about I paint them for his farewell gift? We collectively got them framed (in a white matt board and frame) – he was very pleased indeed!
I am happy how they turned out. I only had one afternoon to get this done, so I picked watercolour, which is very fast to dry and so you can get layers on fast. I had some qualms about the style but chose to go with representational.
Well it turns out all the work in watercolour landscape has stood me in good stead, as has my many cat paintings of the past, as has all the documentation I’ve read on working in watercolour in a different way.
I worked in wet-and-wet initially, dropping colours in, and then many thin washes/glazes to build up the ‘white’ bits, also the colour bits the same way. The final layer was wet on dry with thin brush and that represented the fur. I also mixed the white shadows as blue/red/yellow mix to get a grey – I’ve never done that before. There is very little pure white in these cats, it’s almost all the palest grey going into darker grey.
The last layer of white was a thinned layer of grey that I put in strokes of, to suggest fur. Worked a treat, a hint of fur giving the impression of fluff rather than every hair. Painting well in this sort of picture is about suggesting textures without laboring over it too much.
Both pictures were based on photographs of the cats with backgrounds of vegetation, I decided to make a really abstract vegetation using salt dropped into a very thin wash of colours.
The cats both had bright white whiskers which initially I put in but they vanished into the background, so I did the whiskers in thinned grey with a very fine brush, and it worked well.
I am pleased with these for a number of reasons – it only took an afternoon to do both, they came together fast and well, and the recipient was really pleased. So all good!